All atwitter

Monday, November 9, 2009

OpenGL ES and 5.0 widgets were impressive, but most impressive of all...

They showed a jaw-dropping demo of reloading an application in the simulator without restarting the simulator and waiting for ages for the bloody thing to start up! Good morning freedom!

Another demo from RIM research dungeons: a too-good-to-be-true demo of a completely Java-based simulator, and they teased all of us poor souls with a screenshot of it running on Mac OS X. Now, of course, my gut feeling is it's not going to be available for at least half a year — but at least they are moving in the right direction.

New Eclipse 1.1 plugin looks spiffy. I just might start running Eclipse in parallel with my beloved IntelliJ Idea, an IDE of unparalleled beauty and power. Still better than running JDE on VmWare in parallel with IntelliJ Idea on OSX. And now for some delusionary dreaming: now that Idea is open-source, how about a full-scaled BlackBerry™ plugin for Idea? Pretty please?

First glance at visual editor for GUI in Eclipse plugin: I'm looking forward to how badly it's going to screw up when faced with manual edits to its generated code and slightly-more-complex-than-trivial layouts.

Flash, Webkit: right direction, but meh for now: mention it when you actually have something to show.

Payment system and ads: huge in impact, but of course in no way innovative. Still a welcome addition.

Friends

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" — was that it? — "I prefer men to cauliflowers" — was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was! — a few sayings like this about cabbages.